Graphic design services pro Rick Petfalski, Graphic Innovations, LLC, talks about QuarkXPress to InDesign plugin, Q2ID, during a video interview by David Dilling, Markzware Europe.
DAVID: Hi, everybody. David Dilling for Markzware, here. And, today, we have Rick Petfalski on the line from Wisconsin. He’s a Q2ID customer, Quark to InDesign conversion filter customer. And let’s throw it over to Rick, right away, and learn what Rick does and where he’s, well, he’s from Wisconsin. Right, Rick? How are you doing?
RICK: Good. How are you doing, today?
DAVID: Good. Maybe we could kick off and you can tell us a little bit about what your company does.
RICK: We are a graphic services provider. We print on everything from buildings to brochures. We produce wall graphics, window graphics, vehicle graphics, brochures, business cards, posters, T-shirts, coffee mugs, anything that’s got an image on it, we produce it. And we either take customers’ files that are provided to us or we create them from the ground up, including photography and graphic design.
DAVID: Wow! Yes, so, you have all kinds of services you offer. And what type of equipment do you have in-house?
RICK: We have some Ricoh digital equipment. We have HP latex-based, wide format, and various offset processes.
DAVID: Excellent, excellent. And on the software side, maybe tell us a bit about your software workflow. What kind of software do you use in-house, on a daily basis?
RICK: So, files that we create organically, probably for the last three to five years, we’ve migrated over to pretty much exclusively using the Adobe Creative Suite programs, so, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign.
We’ve been doing… We’ve been at this game for 20+ years. So, previously, we’ve mainly used Quark, but in the last three to five years, we’ve switched over to InDesign.
DAVID: Right, which leads us perfectly into the next series of questions, Rick. Okay, so, you purchased Q2ID about how long ago?
RICK: About six months ago. Yeah.
DAVID: Okay, and how was the process? I mean, like purchasing, downloading, and installing. Did it all go smoothly?
RICK: It did. I was away on a trip and I needed to desperately be able to open up some Quark files on my laptop, which only had the Adobe Suite on it, and remembered the software was available out there.
I found the website through Google, found the product, bought it, downloaded it, right there in the hotel room, onto my laptop, and was up and operating, within a few minutes of getting it.
DAVID: Wow! So, you needed to do something really quickly and you thought, “Well. I remember that Q2ID. Let’s see if that will do it.” Right?
RICK: Yeah. I was way on a vacation and forgot to do something, before I left, along with, you know, you’ve got ten thousand things to do before you leave for a trip. And I realized, when I had arrived at our destination, that I did not take care of our customers’ newsletter that needed to go out, in the next few days.
I had their files, and I had the previous month’s files, which were done in Quark, and I had to find a way, quickly, to do that. It happened to be Christmas Day, when I realized this. So, I wasn’t going to bother any of my employees to take care of it. So, I had.
DAVID: Wow! Yeah, that would be like… What was that guy’s name? Scrooge, right?
RICK: Yeah.
DAVID: Amazing! So, Q2ID actually kind of saved your holiday. It saved your Christmas.
RICK: It did. Yeah. At least, it took away the pressure of the worry. While we were there, I was able to get the work done and, then, relax and enjoy our trip.
DAVID: Awesome, awesome. And, for people that are considering, I mean, how easy is Q2ID to use?
RICK: If you can click on a mouse and click on a menu. It’s pretty much that simple.
DAVID: Yeah.
RICK: It opens up files pretty seamlessly. I was expecting elements to move around a little bit, or maybe colors to be off, or fonts to be substituted. Now, that happens [in the industry]. The minor things you might have is some hyphenation changes, within a document, and even that’s fairly rare.
DAVID: Right, right. So, I guess the next question is would you recommend Q2ID to other people?
RICK: Very much so, especially if you’re trying to find a solution to migrate from Quark over to InDesign. It seems to be where our workflow is going.
DAVID: Yeah.
RICK: We still have years and years of files in Quark and we don’t want to give up all that work we did of creating those files, but, every once in a while, dates have to change or some small content has to change.
DAVID: Yeah. Right.
RICK: And it’s the solution for that.
DAVID: Right. Now, a totally different question. I might even cut this out, here, but do you… Have you tried any of these new layout programs, like Affinity and these sorts of things? Or are you pretty much set?
RICK: I’ve used Affinity, for the… There’s like a Photoshop-type app.
DAVID: Oh, yeah. Designer. Yeah.
RICK: So, I’ve used it, for that, but I haven’t used any of the other page layout programs. My whole business is being able to connect with others and clients. And there’s a number of products out there that are actually better than some of the mainstream products out there. But they’re not any good, if you don’t have a big user base.
DAVID: Right.
RICK: Everyone’s using the Creative Cloud and stuff like that, so, yeah, pretty simple.
DAVID: Excellent! Well, thank you, Rick, for your time. What I’m going to do is pop over here and let people see more information. Here’s Rick’s web address. And you can see the text here.
Like you just said, they do a lot of different stuff. So, if you’re in the Wisconsin area, Rick can certainly help you out with this sort of print work. Here’s their web page. They also do sports photography which is really cool, because that’s a hobby of mine.
And, over here on LinkedIn, Rick. I just tried to connect with him a second ago. He has his full portfolio, up there, and more information. And, here, you can see the Graphic Innovations, and you can see some of the work, the banners. And, yeah, LinkedIn is a pretty good tool, as well. So, connect with Rick, over there.
And I’ll come back to you over here, to Skype. And Rick, I really want to say thank you for taking the time, because we first tried this with FaceTime and we had a little bit of a facepalm, probably my fault, so sorry.
RICK: Well, the face part worked. It was just the voice, I think.
DAVID: Yeah, Skype worked. So, you’ve got to throw that out there, but I really appreciate it, Rick. Have a great day and thank you. Thank you, again.
RICK: Thanks for your time.
DAVID: Alright. Take care.
About Markzware
Markzware, a privately-held company based in Santa Ana, California, is the leading software publisher providing solutions for printing quality control and desktop publishing conversion tools. Markzware supports major graphic software layout applications used by creative professionals, printers and publishers in the international graphic arts, printing and digital multimedia industries.
You can purchase the Q2ID bundle of QuarkXPress to InDesign conversion software, via the Q2ID product page.
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Graphic Design Services Pro on QuarkXPress to InDesign Plugin, Q2ID
